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Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

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Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#371

Post by kbolino »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #369
kbolino wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logical Block Addressing (LBA) by its very nature provides no hard guarantees about where the blocks are located. However, the convention that both sides (file systems and drive controllers) recognize is that runs of consecutive LBAs generally refer to physically contiguous regions of the underlying storage (and this is true for both conventional spinning-platter HDDs as well as most flash-based SSDs). The protocols…

Sure, but bad block tracking and error correction are pretty different from the implied file/volume awareness I was responding to.

Yes, to be clear, the drive controller generally (*) has no concept of volumes or files, and presents itself to the rest of the computer as a flat, linear collection of fixed-size logical blocks. Any additional structure comes from software running outside the drive, which the drive isn't aware of. The conventional bias that adjacent logical blocks are probably also adjacent physical blocks merely allows the abstraction to be maintained while also giving the file system some ability to encourage locality of related data.

* = There are some exceptions to this, e.g. some older flash controllers were made that could "speak" FAT16/32 and actually know if blocks were free or not. This particular use was supplanted by TRIM support.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#372

Post by Zekio »

Hamuko wrote: post #278
Zekio wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can run ZFS without the Unraid disk array in unraid these days

Doesn't that get rid of one of the biggest benefit of Unraid where you can mix and match drives, just like in a Synology hybrid RAID?

that is true, but you can make one fast pool using zfs and one slower one using unraids disk array, if you want to, or just use the zfs part as a cache for performance

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#373

Post by leptons »

worthless-trash wrote: post #257
leptons wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how many TB of online HD storage I have, hard disks are just a temporary buffer for my tape drives.

This is an area that i'm quickly growing into, what are you curently using and what should I stay away from ?

I got a used internal LTO5 tape drive on eBay for about $150, and then an HBA card to connect it to for about $25 or $30. I bought some LTO5 tapes, and typically I pay about $3.50/TB on eBay for new/used tapes. Many sellers charge far more for tapes, but occasionally I find a good deal. Most tapes are not used very much and have lots of life left in them (they have a chip inside the tape that tracks usage).

Then I scored another 3 used LTO5 tape drives on eBay for about $100, they all worked. I mainly use 1 tape drive. I have it running on an Intel i5 system with an 8-drive RAID10 array (cheap used drives, with a $50 9260-8i hardware RAID card), which acts as my "offsite" backup out in my detached garage - it's off most of the time (cold storage?) unless I'm running a backup. I can loose up to 2 drives without losing any data, and it's been running really well for years. I have 3 of these RAID setups in 3 different systems, they work great with the cheapest used drives from Amazon. I'm not looking for high performance, I just need redundancy. I've had to replace maybe 3 drives across all 3 systems due to failure over the last 7 years.

On Windows the tape drive with LTFS was not working well, I think due to Windows Defender trying to test the files as it was writing them, causing a lot of "shoeshining" of the tape, but I think Windows Defender can be disabled. But I bought tape backup software from https://www.iperiusbackup.com - it just works and makes backups simple to set up and run. I always verify the backup. If something is really important I'll back up to at least 2 tapes. Some really important stuff I will generate parity files (win WinPar) and put those on tape too. Non-encrypted the drive runs at the full 140MB/s, but with encryption it runs at about 60MB/s, because I guess the tape drive is doing the encryption.

I love it, it has changed my data-hoarding life. At $3.50/TB and 140MB/s and 1.5TB per tape, it can't be beat by DVD-R or hard drives for backup. Used LTO5 is really in a sweet spot right now on eBay, but LTO6 is looking good too recently (2.5TB/tape). LTO6 drives can read LTO5 tapes, so there's a pretty easy upgrade path. I also love that there is a physical write-protect switch on the tapes, which hard drives don't have. If you plug in a hard drive to an infected system, that hard drive could easily be compromised if you don't know your system is infected.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#374

Post by hkchad »

I have 3 Synology NAS units with about 80TB of total disk space across the 3. When I replace them I will not be replacing them with Synology, they have lost me as a customer. I switched to Synology after having done the homebuilt NAS for years and just wanted something that works. OSS has come a long way since then so time to go back to what I know and can trust.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#375

Post by j45 »

lazide wrote: post #111
j45 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other manufacturers like Qnap also have this app ecosystem. It doesn’t address the mandatory nature of drives when at most dell and hp have put their part number on drives for the most part.

The issue is QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level compared to Synology (also with Apps). The number of times I’ve broken things on QNAP systems doing what should be normal functionality, only to find out it’s because of some dumb implementation detail is over a dozen. Synology, maybe 1-2. Roughly the same number of systems/time in use too.

It's news to me, maybe I haven't touched mine much out of leaving it absolutely stock.

Were you installing things manually or just using the app store?

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#376

Post by j45 »

frontlodjkgi wrote: post #157
transpute wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level Some QNAP devices can be coaxed into running Debian. https://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Debian_Installation_On_QNAP https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/QNAP

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build any NAS and chuck Debian on it if you didn't care about the OS and vendor software to begin with?

Storage should be an appliance, or you're the appliance repair man always on call.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#377

Post by j45 »

frontlodjkgi wrote: post #234
transpute wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

e.g. QNAP has rare hardware combo of half-depth 1U low-power Arm NAS /w mainline Linux support, 32GB ECC RAM, dual NVME, 4x hotswap SATA, 2x10G SFP, 2x2.5G copper, hardware support for ZFS encryption, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868855 . In theory, one could fit an Arm RK3588 SBC with NVME-to-PCIe-to-HBA or NVME-to-SATA into half-depth JBOD case. That would give up 2x10G SFP, 2xNVME and ECC RAM.

Maybe it's just me, but rare harware isn't something I'd look for in a reliable storage system unless I had a really special need general hardware just couldn't be made to do

Rare more means a unique combination of common hardware products, where other manufacturers don't put all of the features into one piece of hardware like qnap or others might, to keep people buying more devices to get what they want, or buy a device that is way too overkill for their needs.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#378

Post by j45 »

transpute wrote: post #346
frontlodjkgi wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just me, but rare harware isn't something I'd look for in a reliable storage system unless I had a really special need general hardware just couldn't be made to do

Per sibling comment, "unique" is a better descriptor than "rare". The NAS is made in Taiwan and has been readily available from Amazon or QNAP store. The Marvell CN913x SoC has been shipping for 5 years, following the predecessor Armada SoC family released 10 years ago and used in multiple consumer NAS products, https://linuxgizmos.com/marvell-lifts-curtain-on-popular-nas... . Mainline Linux support for this SoC has…

This is spot on. I'd like to add that unique often in hardware is not forcing people to buy a few times to get it right, especially first time buyers.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#379

Post by j45 »

nicolas_t wrote: post #252
j45 wrote: post #94

Spot on. I’d add that mandatory drives when they aren’t the experts in it making drives a bad move. Maybe other manufacturers are the way.

They're just white labeling Toshibas

If the drives must identify as a QNAP secured drive, they could be whitelabeled toshibas but a user can only buy their white-labeled toshibas I'm presuming.

Re: Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move

#380

Post by Melatonic »

spease wrote: post #225
franga2000 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them

> That's a great argument for selling drives, not for locking your devices down to practically require them The counterargument is, people won’t listen and then blame Synology when their data is affected. At which point it may be too late for anything but attempting data recovery. Sufficiently nontechnical users may blame the visible product (the NAS) even if the issue is some nuance to the parts choice made by a tec…

I see your argument here and this could also be solved by some type of somewhat difficult flag that Synology could implement.

Meaning that by default it could require a Synology drive that is at minimum going to work decently.

Want to mess around more and are more technical ? Make it a CLI command or something the average joe is going to be wary about. With a big warning message.

Personally I only like to buy very reliable enterprise class drives (probably much better than whatever Synology will officially sell) and this is my main concern.

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